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Windows Games on Macs Without Windows
Dotnaught writes "TransGaming Inc. is making its 'Cider' portability engine for Apple's Intel-based Macs available to Windows game developers. The software promises to let Windows games run on Intel Macs without Windows or Apple's Boot Camp. 'Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs,' the company claims. Cider is a software for game developers, not end-users. Cider-enhanced games are scheduled to appear as soon as October. If Cider works well, will there be any more Mac-specific game development? And if not, will it matter?"
If this is for real, then we might just see more Mac ports of games, and quicker turnaround than before (since most of the work of "porting" will be handled by the library). I'd worry about DirectX games though... They'd probably have to dynamically translate the DirectX calls to OpenGL which could get hairy.
Your post is short and won't get the attention it deserves.
In short, there are already many ways to write games that run on Windows, Mac and Linux simultaneously. Qt is one. SDL is another.
Having yet another framework to program with doesn't change the fact that testing and quality control on multiple operating systems is a -nightmare-.
Devs don't ignore linux/mac because they lack a framework, they ignore it because their employers have told them it doesn't make monetary sense. Adding the cost of a game framework onto that cost won't help it any.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
This sounds pretty awesome. I almost wish, though, that they'd just release Cedega itself for OS X. That way we wouldn't have to trust in developers.
The implications of Cedega as a cross-platform product would be really interesting. Like, something I keep wondering is whether, once they've got DX10 support working on Cedega for Linux, Transgaming could release a Windows version that would enable DX10 [Vista] games to run on Windows XP.
Cedega is the most unstable, buggy, and alltogether awful gaming product on Linux. It has done more to hold back Linux gaming than anything I can imagine. Why should a developer waste any resources when "Cedega allows you to run Windows games in Linux!" Newsflash: The games don't FUCKING WORK.
Transgaming brags about all these great results on their website but the sheer number of workarounds and hacks to get a game to play are unbearable. And what's worse is that the games, once installed, randomly crash, screw up graphics, display incorrect fonts, lose mouse control, can't position correctly on the screen, takes an inordinate amount of Microsoft software to even function... BLAH.
I bought (and still pay) for Cedega because of their promises of Civilization IV stability. Nope. Will their tech support help you? Nnnnope. Will Fixraxis ever consider putting out a Linux binary? Why should they? Transgaming's site just brags and brags about how well Civ IV works under Cedega. Now take a look at Transgaming's forums and see just how successful their product is at running Civ IV: it isn't.
Add Transgaming's SHIT license and restrictions (We steal from Wine. We Do not GIVE to Wine. And don't even think about adding Cedega to your distribution.) and you have a complete turd of a product.
Cedega's major improvements to their software in the last two months has been: Interface improvements and a patch for Guild Wars. That's it. The end. I'm not just asking for Civ IV support either. There's scores of games that are supported by edega that just don't work. Just check their forums.
If this is the future of gaming on the Mac, there is NO future of gaming on the Mac.
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Simple business sense: When two platforms (Windows and Xbox) use a single API (DirectX) and those platforms are far an away the largest combined market share out there, it doesn't make sound business sense to code on anything but the API expressly designed for those platforms. While Qt's GL component does solve a great many of the problems with porting to various platforms, there is still extra hassle involved that isn't there when you just commit to Direct X. Anyone who writes a game in OpenGL so that they might be able to port it, is doing it for the love, not for money. If Apple really wanted to bring games to their OS, they'd pretty much have to find some way to license and maintain an OS X port of Direct X. Hopefully with an Obj-C wrapper (a guy can dream, can't he?).
From what I can see, only one of those blocks are coming down. The other one, price, is still lingering. For about $100 less than what Apple wants for [computer specs], I can get a comparably Dell [computer specs].
Do you steal your software? Seriously, the software that comes with the Mac is a big part of what makes it such a value. For a developer, XCode is amazing and free, compared to Visual Studio for somewhere in the $300-$800 range, depending on the version. For a creative home user, the iLife suite is a godsend; GarageBand, iMovie, and iDVD are hard to match on Windows without expensive software. Also factor in the maintenance costs (money, time, frustration) of trying to keep a system secure or dealing with it when it's not; keep in mind the usual case of somebody who isn't enough of a power user to know all of the necessary tricks.
Personally, I've also found myself to be many times more efficient on OSX than Windows when doing just about anything. So for me, that's a major cost savings right there. Also, since you specifically compared laptops, do you not care about form factor and weight? I've seen some pretty huge Dell laptops, and not at all in a good way.
It matters, and a whole lot.
I'm the proud owner of a MBP since about a week. Aside from the psychological pain of inflicting something as ugly as windos on something as slick as the MBP, there are a lot of practical concerns.
The two most important ones are the constant rebooting - on a machine I would otherwise pretty much never switch off, but only send to hibernate by closing the lid - and, probably worse, partitioning.
On a notebook, you get 100 GB or so. Games take a _lot_ of space. If you do anything else that takes space, music or digital photography or anything, then partitioning a 100 GB drive in such a way that you feel even remotely confident that it'll be enough for both systems for the forseable future is anything but easy.
Add the fears that some crazy windos virus does something bad to the harddisk that's bad enough to wipe out the OSX partition.
No, Sir. It matters a whole lot whether or not there will be Mac games in the future. And quite frankly, Linux gaming is as dead as it gets, and I'm not sure if transmeta and WineX/Cedega don't have a part in that.
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I think you're working from some very old data. In the late eighties and early nineties, Apple somewhat misguidedly tried to bolster its reputation in the business market by discarding the "toy" image and not encouraging game development. However, once their market share began to seriously tank in the mid/late nineties, Apple "got religion" about games and realized how important they were to keeping their users happy.
After that, Apple hired a series of people as "Games Partnership Managers" to reach out to the game developer community. Apple has recently been rumored to be adding gaming functionality to the iPod. Apple famously reached out to John Carmack with OpenGL to bring iD games to the Mac. Apple devotes a whole section of their retail stores to games. And, of course, they have made gaming a featured section on their website.
So, I think your assertion about Apple discouraging games was once true but is very much outdated.
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This is the most reliable trajectory to ensure increased dependence on Windows and Windows products, most of all through the technology lock-in that is DirectX. Anyone touting this as the boat that will carry them from the foul shores of Microsoft are clearly out of their dangling minds.
This is bad for OpenGL/SDL/Qt and bad for any platform which relies on these tools for both game and non-game applications; as long as people can author games on the Windows platform and run it in a WINE-like wrapper, they won't consider native releases. OpenGL will get less attention as the market consolidates on DirectX and the quality and feature-set of the code falls behind as a result. It really can, and in fact does, work like that.
DirectX has risen from near nothing in a few short years. MS invested alot of money strategically situating the platform dependent DirectX in opposition to the platform neutral OpenGL on the Windows platform through tools and API development, and to a large degree it has worked. Games are faster made for the Windows platform using these high-level Windows-only API's, and so now many developers consider DirectX on Windows as the only sane context for game development altogether. As a result, DX will continue to rise at the great expense of platform portable tools like OpenGL if it is blindly, yet directly, supported by idiocy like this. Let's not invite a day we have 'DirectX only' on the back of some graphic cards.
I'll say it again. Projects such as Cedega and 'Cider' ensure long-term codepedency with MS, as a technology provider, at the expense of high performing, native games. This simply takes Apple and Linux build targets 'off the map' from the perspective of game development and lets them get on with making great games for Windows - ensuring MS is always that arsehole you call when you're high, dry and have got the shakes.
Dumping Windows for Linux or OSX is only the first step to being free of MS products, the dirty blood runs deeper than that.
Besides, Windows started out as just a "work" OS (as all computer were for "work" back in those days).
But Windows wasn't Microsoft's brain child. It was the brain & love child of Microsoft and IBM. When the collaborative license was due to be renewed, Microsoft bolted, putting Plan B into effect: making one of their own. For a while after that, OS/2 and Windows software were interchangeable. There were even OS/2 focused books ~1993+ (Win 3.1 was ~May '92) before the publishers saw the spraypaint on the wall. I've probably got one somewhere in my unusual stack. (e.g. The first Internet book - Ed Krol ~Fall '92, the last OS/2 (user) book, a VB/DOS book, etc.
This should not prove to be a surprise. Ethically or Financially, Right or Wrong, Microsoft has made a lot of money (and saved a lot of time) purchasing & modifying the work product of others. See OS/2 & Windows (above), Microsoft providing HQ service & support with Compu$erve (someone asked me what I thought would happen then and I told them: "Micro$oft is preparing for an online service by seeing the ins and outs of how someone makes theirs work." M$N. Front Page. Visual SourceSafe, GIANT software, etc. Heck, look at DOS. Bought it a leverage of $50'000, hoping IBM would license it. (whew! they did). No chance for Microsoft Bob. The marriage to WHG III got in the way. So they scrapped it for pieces -- that's how Clippy was born.
People have talked about submarining patents, Microsoft has done the same thing with products. Never write what you can buy or steal. Or, as Nathan said after getting his JD: "You can't out-develop Microsoft, but you can out-invent them." The part re: not-develop is because they can buy a couple of companies in an extremely short period of time, out-developing someone else in what amounts to a short period of time. And Nathan should know, as his JD focused upon patent law and his group has focused specifically upon investing in or purchasing patents and been rather open about it. In fact, he and Microsoft have invested in the same companies (despite claims of animosity). The danger of trying to out-invent them is hearing the spooky voice of a landshark saying one word, over & over: " Farnsworth ".
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Why? If it's translating the DirectX calls (which abstract the hardware) into OpenGL calls (which also abstracts the hardware) , why do you need GPU virtualization?
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